Example: You do a web searches for New York Yankees and Cincinnati Reds and try to determine the relative popularity of each by looking at the number of times each can be found on the internet. What will skew the results is when all MLB baseball teams are listed on the same page, so you won't get a fair measurement.

Meet Carl Bialik, author of a weekly Wall Street Journal column called The Numbers Guy. He writes about numbers and the role they play in our society. I've covered his articles at least once before and think the topics he chooses are fairly interesting. Here's his official blurb:

Carl Bialik, a former technology reporter for the Online Journal, is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn, N.Y. He has long had an interest in looking at the way numbers are used, and abused, in the news, business and politics. In addition to The Numbers Guy, he also co-writes The Daily Fix, a sports column that appears each weekday morning on WSJ.com. Carl has a degree in mathematics and physics from Yale University. He welcomes your letters at numbersguy@wsj.com.